A most riveting account of the phenomenal rise of Dawood Ibrahim from a Dongri gangster to a Dubai don and financier of terrorist outfits.

With the Big D as its main protagonist, it hardly comes as a surprise that S. Hussain Zaidi's Dongri to Dubai flew off the shelves by the dozen and the first print run of the book has already been sold out.

Courtesy crime folklore in Mumbai/Bombay, the media and of course Bollywood, our desi Godfathers such as Haji Mastan, Vardarajan Mudaliar, Karim Lala, Dawood Ibrahim and Chhota Rajan have become larger than life figures. But given the relative paucity of literature on the underworld, the hunger for books on the topic is immense and a work like Dongri to Dubai was long overdue. And there was nobody as well-placed to accomplish this as Zaidi - a crime journalist with nearly two decades of experience behind him and the author of the incredibly insightful and addictively engaging narrative on the 1993 blasts, Black Friday.

Judging by the fact that it took four to five sittings to finish reading the 363-page book, Dongri to Dubai is extremely fast-paced and readable. This is no small achievement as the book traverses the long journey of the Mumbai Mafia - from petty stabbing incidents in the 1950s to its inextricable linkages with global terrorism six decades later. What could however have been a seminal work on organised crime in the Maximum City ends up as a rather filmy-style narrative of Dawood's journey from a tough guy in Dongri to the Don of Dubai, and finally a global terrorist. The Bollywood touches begin with the cover and back page itself, which contain accolades by Anil Kapoor, John Abraham and Sanjay Gupta.

The book is replete with unnecessary dialogue-baazi and drama such as Dawood's 1974 soda-bottle attack on the burly Pathan Bashu Dada, the then Don of Dongri, to avenge the humiliation of his father and elder brother, or his Bollywoodstyle speech at a meeting organised by Haji Mastan to make peace between him and the Pathans. If the depiction of the latter incident is accurate, Dawood could have given the Big B and Salim-Javed a run for their money. The Don is supposed to have snatched the cigarette Mastan was smoking and crushed it in his palm and said, "We know how to handle the fire and when to crush it with bare fingers."

Dongri to Dubai by S. Hussain Zaidi; Roli Books; Rs 350.

These flourishes are at the expense of contextualisation. Zaidi does not answer certain key questions he himself raises at the beginning: Why did Dongri emerge as the epicentre of crime in Mumbai? Why did the Muslim youth of Bombay take to crime? He has also brushed through certain extremely crucial events in Mumbai's history such as the 1982 mill strike, which changed the nature of the city and the mafia.

It is unfair to expect a book to be encyclopaedic in the ground it covers. But surely the amount of space wasted on details of the mannerisms of the various dons and a rather superfluous chapter on Osama Bin Laden's killing could have been utilised in bringing some analytical depth.

Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra (who incidentally has written the foreword for Dongri to Dubai) had a much better depiction of the wheels-within-wheels nature of crime, politics and espionage in Mumbai. This is despite it being a work of fiction, or perhaps because of it. But the book's shortcomings become obvious only because the expectations are very high, and in the final analysis, they are outweighed by its many positives.

Most importantly, Zaidi doesn't view Dawood through the lenses of hindsight, which is not an easy task given the iconic status that man has come to assume. His narrative remains true to how Dawood was viewed at the various phases of his life. For instance in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Dawood, being a policeman's son as well as a Maharashtrian, was seen at least by the Mumbai Police as a rather desirable counterweight to the Pathan gangsters. Zaidi brilliantly narrates how Dawood, which is Arabic for David, took on and defeated Mumbai's Goliaths - sadistic dons such as Alamzeb and Amirzada Pathan as well as Samad Khan, whose brutality compelled Pathan patriarch Karim Lala to throw kinship ties out of the window

The depiction of Dawood's stint in Pakistan is also insightful, especially the fact that he has no attachment to abstract ideas such as jihad and religion. Forging links with Islamic terrorists is a pragmatic decision aimed at making himself indispensible to the Pakistanis (see extract).

When you are declared a global terrorist, survival is difficult. Seven years ago, Pakistan used the opportunity to tighten the screws on him after the global terrorist tag by America. Dawood knew that was his death knell and soon he would become expendable. But this is where his astuteness came into play. He knew before anyone else that Pakistan was going to be outrun by fundamentalists.

Dawood thus began offering huge donations to these rogue outfits, fuelling their gargantuan growth. The money emboldened their jihadi activities and changed the dynamics of Pakistan's politics, and power equations between the ISI and jihadi organisations.

The Markaz-ud Dawa (front organisation of Lashkar-e-Tayyeba) began using Dawood's services for international money laundering. For Dawood, cleansing the Markaz funds from his bases in Europe and Southeast Asia was a cakewalk.